Author Archives: disinterested spectator

A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die (1968)

In most Westerns, the protagonist is mentally healthy. He may have a single-minded obsession about something, like John Wayne’s character in Red River or in The Searchers, but that is just part of his manliness. There are a few Westerns, however, in which the protagonist is mentally ill. There is Sterling Hayden’s character in Johnny Guitar, who is gun crazy, and there is Charles Bronson’s character in Once Upon a Time in the West, who does not simply want revenge against the man who killed his brother, but is an obsessive-compulsive, who keeps playing the harmonica that was in his mouth when his brother died, and he even wears clothing similar to what he wore on that day. In such movies, the music is usually in a minor key.

A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die is in that subgenre. The protagonist, Clay McCord (Alex Cord) has, or at least thinks he has, epilepsy, and is haunted by memories of his father having fits. When his gun hand starts acting up in moments of temporary spasms and paralysis, he thinks it is just a matter of time before he will meet with the same fate. Even though he needs his partner to help him out when his hand freezes up, he parts with him because he cannot stand the idea of someone else seeing him in that way.

He realizes that his days as a gunslinger and bandit are coming to an end, and so he decides to apply for amnesty, which is being offered in the territory of New Mexico. However, it turns out that he does not have epilepsy, but rather has been bothered by a bullet lodged near his spine, which is removed. Nevertheless, he applies for the amnesty anyway and gets it. But it is hardly a happy ending, because he still seems to be troubled by his past.

The movie is marred by a couple of absurdities. After being rescued from Escondido by a government agent, he rides with him in his wagon until a couple of riders approach. McCord kills both of them, and then tells the agent to unhitch one of his horses, because he needs a horse to go his own way. But the two men he just killed were riding horses, which are now saddled and ready for use, and all McCord has to do is get on one of them. As one of the agent’s horses is unhitched, however, we see the two dead men in the background, but not their horses, for some strange reason.

Second, McCord decides to hide out in a place called Beaver Head, which is a nice cabin, completely unoccupied and stocked with rifles and dynamite just sitting there for the taking. No explanation is given for the existence of this place, or why, with all the bandits around, it remains unmolested.

Those two absurdities notwithstanding, however, this is the best Spaghetti Western not directed by Sergio Leone.

This Gun for Hire (1942)

This Gun for Hire is about a hired killer named Raven, and it uses a variety of means to make us like him. First, Raven is played by Alan Ladd, who is good looking, and we have a natural inclination to like good-looking people. Second, he has a cat for a pet, of which he is very protective, causing him to slap a maid when she runs the cat out of the room after it knocks over a can of milk. We tend to like people who like animals. True, we tend to not like men who slap women, but that is the sort of thing we would expect from a man who kills people for money. It is the positive qualities that he is given to make us like him, in spite of the negative ones that would ordinarily make us not like him, that are interesting.

When he goes to an apartment where there is a man he is supposed to kill, he sees a little girl sitting on the stairs with her legs in braces, probably a victim of polio. He doesn’t like the fact that she is a witness, but he continues on up the stairs. Once inside the room, he is dismayed by the presence of a woman. After he kills the man, he sort of apologizes to the woman, saying he was told the man would be alone, and then he shoots her too. The man he killed was a blackmailer, so we had no sympathy for him, but in killing the woman, who presumably was nothing more than a girlfriend of the blackmailer, Raven shows that he is not averse to killing someone who is innocent, if she happens to be a witness. As a result, we wonder if he will shoot the little girl too on his way back down the stairs. He is tempted, but takes pity on her and simply leaves after handing her the ball she dropped. That is another way the movie gets us to like him.

Furthermore, the movie gives us another villain, Willard Gates, whom we are encouraged to despise. Gates is played by Laird Cregar, who just has the look and manner of someone creepy. He is the one who hired Raven to do the job. He pays Raven off in ten dollar bills, and then double-crosses him by giving the serial numbers to the police so that Raven will go to prison where he cannot talk. At least, that is the idea, but it really doesn’t make sense, because the best way to keep a hit-man from talking to the police is by not double-crossing him. In any event, it turns out that Gates works for a chemical company that is selling a formula for poison gas to the Japanese during World War II. Compared to Gates, Raven seems to be a pretty good guy, for a hit-man.

Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake), a showgirl, is enlisted by a senator to go undercover and investigate Gates and his company. This naturally results in her and Raven crossing paths. He almost kills her to keep her from talking, but she gets away. Eventually, they come to like each other, especially after he rescues her from Gates, who was planning to have her killed. Raven confides in her about dreams he keeps having of the woman who raised him as a child, who beat him regularly, and even hit him with a flatiron, deforming his wrist. This movie was made when psychoanalysis was familiar to audiences, who were therefore primed to accept childhood trauma as an explanation for mental problems later in life. Even today, we tend to accept this explanation for why Raven is the way he is, somewhat excusing his evil nature.

Raven wants to get even with Gates and with Brewster (Tully Marshall), the man Gates works for, while Ellen wants to find out if those two men are traitors. This leads them to cooperate with each other, with Ellen telling Raven where he can find the two men. Brewster is an old man in a wheel chair, which makes him the third person in this movie with some kind of physical disability, though there seems to be no special significance about that in this case, unless it is to provide a dramatic contrast between his physical weakness and his lust for power. In any event, when Raven forces Brewster to sign a confession, the latter dies of a heart attack, after which Raven kills Gates. This is a common ploy of the movies, having the protagonist act from personal motives, which just happen to be of great help for the war effort or some other noble cause. So this is another way the movie gets us to like Raven.

Finally, Raven starts to shoot a police detective, but when he sees that he is Ellen’s fiancé, he holds his fire. This consideration for her makes us like him some more. Then he is shot by a policeman and dies. Because his death is the proper punishment for the crimes he has committed, it balances the books, allowing us to like him without feeling guilty about it.

The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973)

The theme of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing is rape. Catherine (Sarah Miles) is running away from Willard Crocker (George Hamilton), her husband. She stumbles into a train robbery and is taken hostage by the bandits. One of the bandits, Billy (Bo Hopkins), tries to rape her first. Then Dawes (Jack Warden) wants in on it. Jay (Burt Reynolds) stops them. Then some Native Americans come along and try to rape her. This may well be the last Western ever made in which Native Americans try to rape a white woman (the last movie in which Native Americans actually succeeded in raping a white woman was Ulzana’s Raid (1972). Most of the Native Americans in this movie are good, however, as are pretty much most of the Native Americans portrayed in movies afterwards, so this movie is transitional.

Anyway, Dawes finally gets his chance, and he succeeds in raping Catherine. Jay comes along and has a brutal fight with Dawes and finally kills him. Then we find out that Jay killed his wife, a Native American squaw, Cat Dancing, because a man had raped her.  Of course he killed the man who raped her first, but then he decided his wife needed killing too because she was defiled. Fortunately, he seems to have learned his lesson, because he does not kill Catherine. Now, you might think that having married one man who mistreated her, Catherine would be a little reticent about marrying a man that killed his wife for being raped, but that does not seem to bother her, however, because she and Jay end up living happily ever after.

The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003)

The Lord of the Rings:  The Fellowship of the Ring starts off with a prologue telling the history of a bunch of rings, but of one ring in particular, how it was forged, who had it, what he did with it, who got it next, and then it was lost and then it was found, and then it turned up over here, and on and on and on. By the time that was over, I had already lost interest. What followed only made things worse. In a world where anything can happen, one quickly becomes bored. It all reminded me of a video game, in which you have to take an item from point A to point B, overcoming obstacles along the way. Once you get to point B, you move up to level 2, which is a new region, with new creatures, with strange new powers, all of which may assist or hinder you in getting to point C, whereupon you move up to level 3, and on and on and on.

This movie is set in a world sort of like our own, as it was during the Middle Ages, reminiscent of Norse mythology or the Arthurian legends. In such a setting, we expect the dialogue to be different from twenty-first century English, and we certainly don’t want to hear any modern expressions or slang. And so a kind of generic heroic-epic speech is employed, to give the flavor of a different era. And that is fine, but it should not be overdone. Unfortunately, they overdid it. For three hours, we hear this unrelenting heavy manner of speaking, in which almost everything that is said is fraught with ancient mystery and future destiny, until it just wears you out.

For some strange reason, movies set during Medieval or faux-Medieval times seem to have a disproportionate share diminutive folk, be they midgets, dwarfs, elves, trolls, gnomes, or, in the case of this movie, hobbits, which are the main characters. These hobbits have the biggest, ugliest, hairiest, dirtiest feet in this world or that, and they don’t even have the decency to cover them up by wearing shoes, like almost everyone else in the movie. No matter what else happens to these Hobbits, the movie keeps reminding you of their big, ugly, hairy, dirty feet, as if you could possibly forget. Nothing is explained about this in the prologue, which would have been one piece of information worth having, nor is it explained in the movie. I have read that in the book, it is said that Hobbits do not need shoes, because the bottoms of their feet are thick and leathery, while the tops are covered in fur. Well, that’s fine for them, but what about us? They should have some consideration and wear a pair. Fortunately, they did not force us to look at the big, ugly, hairy, dirty feet of a female hobbit. That would really have grossed me out.

The Lord of the Rings:  The Two Towers is the middle movie about Middle Earth, whatever that is supposed to be. Is there an Upper and Lower Earth, a Right and Left Earth, or what?

Anyway, as I watched the hobbits still on their mission to get the ring somewhere to do something with it, I could not help but wonder why all the evil people didn’t just make another ring, if they wanted one so badly. I mean, what one person did once, surely another person could do again. I’m sure there is some perfectly good, unbelievable reason why other evil rings cannot be made, but by the end of this second part of the trilogy I was frankly past caring, because it had been six hours by that point, and I was really tired of it all.

Especially wearying is the relentless epic-speak employed by almost everyone in the movie, which has made me sick of hearing the preposition “of.” These people could never say something like, “We need to go through the Lincoln Tunnel” or “We’ll have to cross the Golden Gate Bridge.” They would have to say, “We must pass through the Tunnel of Lincoln” or “We must cross over the Bridge of the Gate of Gold.” And even when they say something that might look like normal dialogue when written on paper, the characters utter all their lines gravely and ponderously, as if everything they say is of the deepest significance.

An exception to this is Sam (Sean Astin), sidekick of Frodo (Elijah Wood). He actually talks normally. As a result, he became my favorite character, the one I most wanted to hear from. And when he made his speech about the goodness of the world being worth fighting for, it had more effect on me than anything else said in the movie, because it was spoken naturally. Furthermore, Sam’s face is easier to take than Frodo’s look of angelic innocence. I wish Sam had had the ring, and one of the other hobbits had been his sidekick, leaving Frodo out of the story altogether.

In The Lord of the Rings:  The Return of the King, the third part of this trilogy, Frodo finally disposes of the ring.  What follows is the longest, most drawn-out anticlimax in cinematic history.  When the hobbits returned to the Shire and Sam and Rosie (Sarah McLeod) got married, I held my breath.  “Please, please,” I begged the movie, “don’t show me Rosie’s big, ugly, hairy, dirty feet!”  For the most part, my prayers were answered, for we get only the most fleeting glimpse of her feet at a distance as she goes through a door.  Unfortunately, we still had to look, seemingly for minutes on end, at Frodo’s sappy face as he prepared to depart, and that was almost as repulsive.

The Letter (1929, 1940, and 1982)

You know that opening scene in The Letter, that movie made in 1940, where some man comes stumbling out onto the veranda of a bungalow after a shot has been fired, with Bette Davis coming right behind him, pumping him full of lead until she hears the click on a spent cartridge?  It turns out that this movie, and that scene in particular, was ultimately based on a true story in which Ethel Proudlock did pretty much the same thing to her lover in 1911.

Somerset Maugham was inspired by her case to write a short story based on it in 1926, which became the basis for a play, several movies, many of which are in a foreign language, television productions, a musical, and finally an opera.  I guess you could say that there is something about the story that captures the imagination.

Anyway, as for that 1940 version, the shooting takes place on a rubber plantation near Singapore. Bette Davis plays Leslie Crosbie, and the man she kills is Geoffrey Hammond.  As she stands over his body, the moon appears from behind a cloud, causing her to look up as it shines a light on her guilt.

The men who work the plantation, referred to as boys, sleep outside the house.  They are awakened by the shooting. She tells the head boy to send someone for John Withers, the new district officer, and then send another boy for her husband Robert (Herbert Marshall).  When word reaches Robert, he tells a subordinate to call Howard Joyce, who is a lawyer, and who, along with his wife Dorothy, is a friend of the Crosbies.

When Robert gets home, Leslie says of Hammond, “He tried to make love to me, and I shot him.”  In the short story, she says, “He tried to rape me, and I shot him.”  However, one of the “Be Carefuls” of the Production Code was the subject of rape, so I guess not using the word “rape” was one way of being careful.  It sounds funny though.

With Robert, Joyce, and Withers all having arrived, she tells her story.  She tells how she got a surprise visit from Geoffrey Hammond, whom she and Robert had not seen for three months.  After some conversation, he professed his love for her, and when she rebuffed him, he became physically aggressive.  He picked her up and started carrying her when he stumbled on some steps (the ones leading to the bedroom).  She says she got loose, grabbed a revolver, and shot him.

The fact that Joyce, who is her lawyer now, did not insist on speaking to her alone and not in the presence of Withers, an officer of the law, is an indication of just how much he and the others all assume her innocence.  However, Joyce does become a little skeptical, unlike Withers, who completely accepts her story, as does Robert.  Though she will have to be tried for murder, yet an acquittal seems to be a foregone conclusion.

Joyce has a Chinese law clerk, Ong Chi Seng, whose polite manner is an obvious pose, beneath which he conceals his devious methods, instantiating the cliché of the Asian that is able to turn his Western education against the very white people that provided him with it.  He brings to Joyce’s attention the existence of a letter that makes it obvious that Geoffrey and Leslie were lovers, and in which she begged Geoffrey to visit her the night she killed him.  The letter is in the possession of Hammond’s widow (Gale Sondergaard in yellow face), who is Eurasian.

In the short story, she is referred to simply as the Chinese woman Hammond was living with.  To conform to the Production Code, it was probably thought better to have them be married, and even though the prohibition against miscegenation applied explicitly to sex between black and white, misgivings about sex between yellow and white might have led those who produced this movie to ameliorate the situation by having her be at least half-white.

Leslie has to pay $10,000 to get the letter back.  (This is the same sum as in the short story, published in 1926.  Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $175,000 today.)  In addition to that, Mrs. Hammond insists that Leslie bring her the money in person.  The point is to humiliate her.  (In the short story, the Chinese woman makes no such demand, and she shows no interest in exacting revenge on Leslie in any form.  All she wants is the money.)

Joyce has to tell Robert a little about the letter, without revealing just how incriminating it is and without revealing just how much it will cost, saying simply that it would be best to buy the letter. Thinking the sum could not be that great, Robert gives his permission for Joyce to buy the letter.

Guided by Ong, Joyce and Leslie go to meet Mrs. Hammond in the Chinese section of Singapore. When they arrive at a shop, the owner shows Joyce and Leslie some items he has for sale, including a wicked-looking dagger.  Along the principle of Chekhov’s gun, we have an ominous feeling that this dagger will be used before this movie is over.  They are then led into a room where a man is smoking an opium pipe, so much so that the smoke fills the room, and they have to ask for a window to be opened.  When Mrs. Hammond enters the room, we see the hate in her eyes.  After Ong has received the money on her behalf, she demands that Leslie come to her.  Mrs. Hammond throws the letter on the floor, and Leslie has to bow down to pick it up.

Joyce has had his own problems with this business.  He knows it is unethical, even illegal, to suppress evidence in this way.  During the summation at her trial, his guilt bothers him so much that for a moment he cannot go on.  But he steels himself and continues to argue that Mrs. Crosbie only did what any honorable woman would have done in her place, had she the strength and courage to do so.  After he is finished, we see that he is miserable.

After Leslie is acquitted, a party is held at the Joyce residence to celebrate. When there is a moment when Joyce, Robert, and Leslie are alone, Robert is full of excitement about his plan to buy his own rubber plantation in Sumatra. It is then that Joyce has to remind him of the letter he had to pay for and how much it cost.  Shocked by the amount, Robert demands to see that letter.  Joyce hesitates, but a resigned Leslie tells him to give Robert the letter. Then Leslie reveals what really happened that night, how Hammond told her he wanted to end their affair, and in anger she killed him.

Later that evening, Robert wants to forgive her, saying, “If you love a person, you can forgive anything,” apparently forgetting that Leslie’s murder of Hammond contradicts that.  At first, she tries to fake it, but repulsed by her own lie, she tells him she does not and cannot love him, saying, “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed.”

As noted above, the Chinese woman in the short story cared only about the money.  Joyce was going to bring it to her himself, but when Robert found out how much money was involved, he insisted on coming along.  (This makes more sense.  It is a weak point in the movie that Robert does not ask how much the letter will cost.)  When Robert gets his hands on the letter and reads it, he realizes Leslie had been having an affair and that she murdered Hammond.  As the story ends, we gather that he and Leslie will be stuck with each other in a loveless marriage.

That would not have been sufficient punishment for Leslie under the Production Code, especially since her innocent husband suffers just as much as she does.  Therefore, she must die.  Mrs. Hammond is a continual, malevolent presence throughout the movie.  Leslie realizes that her nemesis is waiting for her, and as another full moon shines down on her, she voluntarily steps outside the house for her punishment, which she receives when Mrs. Hammond stabs her with the dagger earlier seen.

Although the Production Code was gone by the time the 1982 version was made with Lee Remick as Leslie, this ending, at least in implication, was kept. Perhaps it was the fact that it was a television movie that led the producers to decide that Leslie still needed to die as punishment for what she did.  A significant difference, however, has to do with the use of flashbacks.  The 1982 version of The Letter allows Leslie’s story about how Hammond supposedly tried to rape her to be visualized even though it is a lie.  For this purpose, Ian McShane, a well-known actor, plays Hammond.  In the 1940 version, the role of Hammond is only a bit part, played by a relatively unknown actor, for all he does is get shot by Leslie at the beginning of the movie.  In fact, there are a total of three visualized flashbacks in the 1982 version, with only the last one being veridical, when Leslie defiantly tells Robert what really happened.  This was the first version I saw, by the way, which I enjoyed so much that I watched the 1940 version at my first opportunity.

A Pre-Code version of this story was made in 1929, starring Jeanne Eagles as Leslie.  The 1929 and 1940 versions illustrate an interesting fact about Herbert Marshall.  He played Leslie’s husband Robert in the 1940 version, but played Geoffrey Hammond, her lover, in the 1929 version.  In general, Marshall seems to do all right sexually when he is a bachelor, such as in Trouble in Paradise (1932), but as a husband, he is usually an unloved, sad sack, such as in Blonde Venus (1932), but especially in The Little Foxes (1941), where he has the misfortune of being Bette Davis’s husband again.

The 1929 version starts off slowly with an establishment shot of some harbor in Singapore.  The next shot is in the city, where lowlifes seek their seedy forms of entertainment, and finally we are brought onto the rubber plantation and into the Crosbie house, where Robert is telling Leslie, who is working on a piece of lace, that he is going into Singapore.  She asks him not to be long.  He tells her how much he appreciates her.  “Only wives like you can make these godforsaken places bearable. Seven years on a rubber plantation, with no company but natives and a lot of dowdy planters’ wives.”

“Yes, Robert,” she replies, “That ought to be the test for a good wife.”

The slow pace of this opening scene gives us a sense of the boredom that Leslie experiences day after day.  It is easy to sympathize with her having an affair, and with the anger she feels later on when Geoffrey tries to break off their relationship, for then she would have absolutely nothing.  This 1929 version gets points for helping us understand Leslie’s desperate situation.

Leslie’s boring life was only more or less implied in the 1940 version, but the 1982 movie emphasizes it, with Leslie becoming furious when Robert tells her of his plans for their future life after she is acquitted, which will practically be just the two of them, together forever.

Anyway, returning to the 1929 version, it is after Robert leaves that she writes the letter to Geoffrey.

The scene changes to where we see Geoffrey lying supine on a couch, reading a section of Oscar Wilde’s poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” in particular the part that begins, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”  He is reading it to Li Ti, who affectionately rests her body on him.  It is clear that she adores him, while we suspect that for him, she is merely another mistress, of whom he will one day tire, much as he is starting to tire of Leslie.  As noted above, Herbert Marshall does all right with women as long as he’s not married to them.

Geoffrey goes to see Leslie, and she tells him how unhappy she is with him, that he is neglecting her. “Don’t you know how I love you?” she asks.

“Well, darling,” he replies, “you have a damn funny way of showing it.”  I guess he didn’t learn a thing from that poem he was reading.

In any event, he tells her that the time has come for their affair to be ended, that he doesn’t love her, and that she means nothing to him.  When she threatens to kill herself, he says, “Go ahead.”  She goes for her gun, but not to commit suicide.

After she is arrested, it comes to her lawyer’s attention that Li Ti has the letter Leslie sent to Geoffrey, and she wants $10,000 for it.  And Leslie has to bring the money herself.  When she arrives, Li Ti pulls open a curtain and reveals five women behind the bamboo bars of a cage, where they are being held as sex slaves.  A Chinese man comes in and looks over the women lasciviously, but none suit his fancy. However, he does show an interest in Leslie, making her uncomfortable.

After Li Ti receives the money, she throws the letter on the floor.  When Leslie bends down to retrieve it, the women in the cage start laughing and pointing at her.  Though their lives are miserable, yet they are vouchsafed this brief moment of happiness in seeing a white woman bow down before a yellow woman.  Well, half-yellow.  She is referred to as half-caste, even though she is played by Lady Tsen Mei, a Chinese actress.  The purpose of this scene is to show us how degenerate the yellow race is, for this version is the most racist of them all in its depiction of Asians, which is not surprising for a Pre-Code movie.

After Leslie testifies in her own defense against a charge of murder, Robert assures her she will be acquitted.  She says she wants to go to London, and he agrees, but only as a two-week vacation. After that, he says he wants to buy a rubber plantation in Sumatra.  Leslie’s face falls.  She will be doomed to even more boredom living there than ever before.

In this movie, Leslie is unpunished and unrepentant, defiantly telling her husband that she does not love him and still loves the man she killed.  And that is it.  She does not have to die in the end.

The Left Handed Gun (1958)

The Left Handed Gun is an uneven movie. It begins with Paul Newman playing Billy the Kid as a borderline simpleton who somehow acquires a normal intelligence by the end of the movie. The first half of the movie is manic, with Billy and his two sidekicks talking loud, acting silly, and laughing at things that are not funny, probably because they are drunk, but ends as some kind of overwrought, psychological melodrama. I think it’s called Method Acting.

This movie would have us believe that we are seeing a demythologized version of this character from the Old West, but it depicts all his killings as being justified, and when he is shot by Pat Garrett (John Dehner), he has no gun in his holster, so he really is not beaten to the draw, all in keeping with the traditional mythology.

I have an idea. Why not make a movie in which Billy the Kid is an evil scumbag, played by an actor as dorky-looking as the real William Bonney? That would be some serious demythologizing.

The Jazz Singer (1927)

Once you strip away historical significance of The Jazz Singer as the first “talkie,” in which audiences were able to hear musical numbers in a movie for the first time, you are left with some pretty heavy melodrama. Forced to choose between a long Jewish tradition from the old country and the individualism and freedom of America, Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) chooses the latter and is disowned by his father, a cantor from a long line of cantors who wants his son to be a cantor. This goes on through the whole movie and it wears you out. But then, on the opening night of his first big break in the theater, Jakie finds out his father is dying, and there is no one to sing in the temple on the Day of Atonement. He agonizes and agonizes over the choice he must make between family and career. But what was he worried about? Didn’t he know this was a Hollywood movie where people get to have it both ways? He chooses to sing for his father, and then goes on to sing in the theater too, becoming a great success.

The Hunger Games (2012)

The basis for The Hunger Games is just a contrivance. It is said that the games referred to in the title, in which two teenagers from each of the Twelve Districts of Panem are forced to fight one another to the death, are punishment for a rebellion that took place seventy-four years earlier. Seventy-four years? Reconstruction only lasted about ten years after the Civil War. And whom would the Capital be punishing? Most of the people who rebelled would have long since died, and most of the people being punished would not even have been born when the rebellion took place.

The squalor of the districts people live in looks like something from the Great Depression. But when the Hunger Games begin, we find that technology has developed to the point that the people monitoring the games can cause three cats to materialize by pressing a button. Well, if they can do that, why not materialize a bunch of cows for the starving people in the districts to eat? Oh yeah, I forgot. They are still being punished for stuff they didn’t do.

We expect all movies to be politically correct to some degree, but when the political correctness is too obvious, you just have to groan. In particular, all the evil people in this movie are white; all the people who are not white are good. Oh brother!

The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)

Because The Greatest Story Ever Told is 225 minutes long, long enough to put in pretty much every part of the story of Jesus that is recorded in the Gospels, it is in many ways more interesting to reflect upon the things that were left out.

It is surprising that many of the well-known miracles were only mentioned, not depicted visually: no scene of Jesus (Max von Sydow) turning water into wine, walking on water, or feeding the multitude with a basket of loaves and fishes. It is not surprising, on the other hand, that we do not see Jesus’s prediction that some of the people he is talking to will still be alive when the kingdom of God comes.

A lot of sins go unmentioned in this movie. Jesus does not say it is adultery to lust after a woman in your heart, or that it is a sin to get divorced, or that marrying someone who is divorced is adultery. But we do get the scene where the adulteress is saved by Jesus, who defies the mob by saying that the one without sin should cast the first stone. That’s what the audience wants to hear, not that lust or divorce are also forms of adultery, but that real adultery itself will be forgiven.

As is typical for a movie about Jesus, he never talks about Hell. There is a movie in which Jesus spends a lot of time talking about all the people who are going to Hell, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), but that is an exception. All the other Jesus movies leave that topic pretty much alone, at least as far as the sermons of Jesus are concerned. In The Greatest Story Ever Told, other people talk about Hell instead. In one scene, there is a religious figure who says that God is going to punish the wicked, but Jesus admonishes him, saying that God is about mercy. Never mind that what the guy was saying was actually similar to what Jesus himself says in the Bible, in this movie, Jesus will have none of it. This is followed shortly by a scene in which John the Baptist (Charlton Heston) tells King Herod (Claude Rains) that he is going to Hell for committing adultery, which again is consistent with the Biblical Jesus but not the Jesus of this movie. And when Jesus is giving Peter (Gary Raymond) the keys of the kingdom, even the relatively innocuous expression “gates of Hell” is left out of Jesus’s speech.

That this movie plays it safe in its treatment of Jesus, avoiding the depiction of anything that might make the audience uncomfortable, is understandable. What is somewhat perplexing, however, is the movie’s treatment of Judas (David McCallum). Where the Bible is ambiguous regarding Judas, so too is the movie. For example, there is some debate as to whether Judas received communion at the Last Supper. Consequently, the movie is ambiguous on this point as well. We see Judas holding the cup near his lips. Then the camera cuts away to Jesus, who makes a brief remark, after which we see Judas still holding he cup, leaving it an open question as to whether he took a sip. Fine. But where the Bible is not ambiguous is on Judas’s motive for betraying Jesus. Judas negotiates with the chief of priests to get thirty pieces of silver for delivering Jesus. The motive is money, pure and simple. But in the movie, instead of asking for money, we hear Judas going on about what a wonderful person Jesus is. And then, somewhat later, when he is given the pieces of silver that he did not ask for, he says he didn’t want any money, which leaves his betrayal of Jesus completely unmotivated. One almost gets the impression that the people who made this movie did not want to show Judas in a bad light, even though this is the man that Dante did not hesitate to put right next to Satan in the frozen lake at the center of the earth.  This treatment of Judas in various Jesus movies is covered more extensively in my essay “On the Rehabilitation of Judas.”

There is one thing in this movie that should have been kept out, and that is John Wayne’s only line. Right at the moment of Jesus’s death, we hear the Duke saying, “Truly, this man was the son of God,” in that unmistakable voice of his, and it is hard to keep from laughing.

The Concert for Bangladesh (1972)

The Concert for Bangladesh is a musical documentary about the first benefit rock concert. The concert starts off with a real downer. Ravi Shankar and three other Indian musicians get set to play on their weird Indian musical instruments. But first, Shankar informs the audience that they must be quiet while he is playing, because this is the kind of music you have to concentrate on. And then he tells everyone not to smoke while he is playing. The audience is quite chastened, and they clap politely after the first number. But it wasn’t a number. The musicians were only tuning up their instruments. But with that kind of music, who can tell? They could have played the wrong notes on instruments out of tune, and nobody would have known the difference.

Once that is over, and the Western musicians start playing normal music, things get a lot better, especially when half the musicians start smoking, letting the audience know that Mrs. Grundy has left the stage, and everyone can loosen up.